If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Can an archetype cause an enormous amount of energy when a lot of people believe it? Just how much energy would be needed to aid a dowser? If there were people who did not go along with the theory and called it "woo" would that detract from the power of the archetype? I think Jung wanted to test this in his intended research into Divination methods.

In Peru you may have heard about the Quipas - it kept poems too. It is very similar to Ogham tracts using the fingers up or down and angled. The knuckles being like the knots in the quipas.

DNA research aids our history in a major way today. We see the Ainu all over the Pacific and Americas - they are also involved with the DNN and are the Sidhe most likely origin.

Many early symbols related to the stars or lights in the skies. It was a very long time before an accurate lunar calendar came to be - and the Le Placard Baton was not the first. So mankind today has to try to put itself into the cognitive processes of ancients who in some cases could see things moving across two hundred miles from a mountain top - like Eustace Mullins can today - but most of us cannot. These people knew some things we will never learn but some people are trying including those who take Ayahuasca like Hancock which I have dealt with is out of order and not in tune with what the shamans sense - maybe Eustace could do it - not Hancock I say. What follows is an open minded approach from the new breed I like to think is influenced by people like myself. That is not to suggest that Sherry is as open as I would like.

"One of my most passionate academic hobbies is archaeoastronomy, which includes the study of how ancient peoples observed the sky. As I will describe in a series of posts on this topic, I pursue my hobby with the use of free data and free software tools like Google Earth and the pyephem astronomical ephemeris calculation library, written in the Python programming language.

Wikipedia gives a good overview of archaeoastronomy:

Archaeoastronomy uses a variety of methods to uncover evidence of past practices including archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, statistics and probability, and history. Because themnse methods are diverse and use data from such different sources, the problem of integrating them into a coherent argument has been a long-term issue for archaeoastronomers.[4] Archaeoastronomy fills complementary niches in landscape archaeology and Archaeocryptography and or cognitive archaeology. Material evidence and its connection to the sky can reveal how a wider landscape can be integrated into beliefs about the cycles of nature, such as Mayan astronomy and its relationship with agriculture.[5] Other examples which have brought together ideas of cognition and landscape include studies of the cosmic order embedded in the roads of settlements.[6][7]

Archaeoastronomy can be applied to all cultures and all time periods. The meanings of the sky vary from culture to culture; nevertheless there are scientific methods which can be applied across cultures when examining ancient beliefs.[8] It is perhaps the need to balance the social and scientific aspects of archaeoastronomy which led Clive Ruggles to describe it as: “…[A] field with academic work of high quality at one end but uncontrolled speculation bordering on lunacy at the other.”[9]

The last comment in that passage speaks truth; archaeoastronomy sometimes tends to get little respect in the hard sciences due to the unfortunate prevalence of woo woo “science” where astronomical alignments in man made structures or geographic features are claimed to be created by aliens or other unknown “advanced races” not related to the actual people living in the region at the time.

Particularly in the case of structures created by native aboriginal peoples, I find offensive the assertion that the structures could not possibly have been made by those peoples.

Perhaps partially because the prevalence of woo (and the negative cast it puts on the field as a respectable academic pursuit), few people seem to be active quantitative practitioners of the field anymore. The heyday of the field was in the 1970′s and 1980′s, with practitioners such as Professors Anthony Aveni and Gerald Hawkins producing many seminal publications. Remarkably few publications have been produced in the field in the last two decades, despite the many subsequent advances in computational tools that can aid in archaeoastronomical research. Some other prominent practitioners of archaeoastronomy and/or researchers of megalithic monuments are Clive Ruggles (still active), Aubrey Burl, Alexander Thom (proponent of the “megalithic yard“, which unfortunately has almost as much woo associated with it as archaeoastronomy), Norman Lockyer, and J McKim Malville (also still active).

In addition to the woo woo, there is also the problem that some amateur (and even professional) archaeologists have claimed astronomical alignments to be definitively present at archaeological sites that have literally thousands of potential lines that could reasonably be drawn to connect features at the site; they pick one or two that happen to be aligned with some phenomenon like summer or winter solstice Sun rise, and claim proof that the site was used for sky-watching purposes. It doesn’t take much background in statistics to realize that in such a site the chances of getting an alignment with some astronomical phenomenon by mere random chance is quite high. Some previous assertions of astronomical alignments of the Nazca lines are an excellent example of “cherry picked data” studies that have since been debunked with more rigorous statistical analyses (for a good overview, see a paper by Gerald Hawkins on this topic, here, in which he discusses studies of possible astronomical alignments of the Nazca lines, sun/moon alignments at Stonehenge, etc).

As an aside, I’ll note here that the Nazca lines are in general the object of many woo woo “theories”, including theories that they must have been built by aliens as landing strips for their aircraft (yes, really). The idea that a collection of lines like the one in this picture were intended as an astronomical observatory seems almost sane in comparison to some of the other theories floating around out there."